by Reaperfan Thu Aug 08, 2013 8:27 pm
More anime updates and my thoughts/very small reviews with no scoring!
Two series this time. First is Spice and Wolf and the second is Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, both by the same guy.
So hey, you ever watch a show about economics? Cuz I hadn't. Probably because nobody knew how to make it interesting. So Spice and Wolf blew me away because it actually made scenes where people sitting around talking about the price market of wheat from a local town or debating the value of currency over material items suspenseful. Not just interesting. I said suspenseful. I still don't really know how they did it. Maybe the fact that it had some of the best characterization I've ever seen on display. I can safely say that the female lead of the show is the single best female character ever portrayed in any media I've ever seen, including non-anime. Watch this show. I enjoyed it almost as much as Clannad (almost). Just do it. It's skyrocketed to somewhere in my top 5 favorite anime.
For the second show, it was pretty good. It wasn't as focused as Spice and Wolf, though it had the same approach. Most of the conflict wasn't action, but rather through character interactions and cultural developments. More than just economics, it covered things like agriculture, politics, and war. That last one was probably the main idea of the series actually, and showing that there's more to war than just the battles, as it attempts to show all the different ways a conflict between two countries can be settled besides fighting. It has one thing over Spice and Wolf though, and that's that it uses a much more fantasy-influenced setting, which made the bigger concepts easier to understand since they could use less realistic approaches to some issues, something that Spice and Wolf fails to do occasionally (depending on how much you pay attention of course) because of it's mostly realistic setting. My recommendation for you all to be watch Spice and Wolf, then if you enjoyed it's storytelling approach, then watch this.
